Professor Greg Jackson

God bless you, my son.

Looking out from the shack, Pepito watches as his father is led to the base of a tall coconut tree near the riverbank.

Still wearing his tattered and crumpled white suit, Jose is offered both a cigarette and a blindfold.

He declines.

Capito takes out his prayer book and with trembling hands, turns the yellowed pages to the prayer for the dead.

As he reads, he hears it.

The now fatherless son continues to pray until his eyes are dry.

As the Land of the Rising Sun's leaders look out on the setting sun of May 6th, 1942, they're delighted by their empire's reach.

Their domain now stretches over multiple time zones.

It contains some 500 million people in captured territory, not to mention there are over 300,000 Allied prisoners of war.

And they've achieved this while suffering remarkably light naval losses.

Only a handful of relatively smaller ships and aircraft.

Thinking broadly over this episode's tale of loss in the Philippines, I'm reminded of the opening lines of the American war correspondent, William White's book, They Were Expendable, which is published in 1942 and soon turned into a movie.

A young naval officer explains, quote, in war, anything can be expendable, money or gasoline or equipment, or most usually men.

They're expending you and that machine gun to get time.

They don't expect to see either one again.

Close quote.

I'd imagine that many of the soldiers involved in the Baton campaign, the battling bastards, if you will, would agree with this unnamed naval officer.

With the Philippines' ultimate surrender, their four-month hold on the peninsula might feel pointless.

But that struggle, that holdout, it wasn't in vain.